Fulbright Alumna Laima Vince: Why I Wrote The Interpreter (Vertejas)

Laima Vince is a writer, poet, and literary translator. Twenty years after the independence movement began, Laima Vince returned to Vilnius as a Fulbright lecturer to document life in Lithuania's fledgling democracy. Over the past four years Laima has traveled around Lithuania's provinces and cities collecting oral histories. She has spoken with postwar partisan fighters; liaison women; Holocaust survivors; exiles to Siberia; German women exiled to Tajikistan; village verbal charmers and healers; young women who have been victims of human trafficking and the social workers who work towards their recovery in underground shelters; Chechen war refugees; gypsies; and gays and lesbians who are fighting for recognition and legal rights in Lithuanian society.

When people see or read The Interpreter many assume I am gay or bisexual. Why else would a
woman write a play with two gay men in relationship as the main characters? And
then, I’ve been attacked by gay friends who are outraged that I—a heterosexual
woman and the mother of three children, and living a conventional lifestyle—could
presume to know what it feels like to be in a homosexual relationship or to
suffer prejudice or experience a hate crime because of my sexual orientation. My
reply is that there are two human qualities that enable us to imagine ourselves
in the lives of others: empathy and the power of the imagination.

The
idea to write something (at the time I had not yet settled on the right genre)
to address intolerance towards homosexuals in the Baltic States, and in
reaction to the protests to prevent the first Baltic Pride parade from taking
place in 2010, came to me that spring when I marched in the Baltic Pride parade
in solidarity with a childhood friend. My friend, a Lithuanian-American, who
had struggled with balancing his sexual orientation with a Lithuanian Catholic
upbringing, had flown to Vilnius all the way from Brazil to march in the first
Baltic Pride parade. For him, this was catharsis. It was something he
absolutely had to do. The parade had been cancelled for security reasons: Thousands
of skinheads were planning to descend on the marchers and “teach them a lesson,”
and indeed they did arrive in Vilnius to disrupt the parade, but were held at
bay by the Lithuanian parade. At the last possible moment permission for the
parade to take place was granted by President Grybauskaite. The mood in Vilnius
on the morning of the parade was tense. In the early morning hours, skinheads had
broken the windows to the offices of the Tolerant Youth Organization and had tossed
Molotov Cocktails inside. Luckily, the home-made bombs did not detonate. Angry
men wearing offensive t-shirts depicting stick figures engaged in anal sex flooded
the streets of Vilnius. If they were the good Catholic youth, I thought, their
aggression and their X-rated T-shirts were doing more damage to the tender
minds of impressionable young children than the peaceful marchers in the
parade. They wove their way down the Old Town’s narrow cobblestone streets bearing
rainbow flags and placards bearing messages of love and tolerance.

In
my book about Lithuanian society two decades after independence, The Snake in the Vodka Bottle, I wrote
the following about my experience marching in the Baltic Pride parade:

“As
we passed through one police barricade, and then another, we saw that a second
crowd had gathered in closer proximity, on the same side of the River Neris as
the marchers. They were being held at bay behind police barricades. They were a
crowd of a different sort. These were the skinheads. This crowd extended up the
cement stairs and spilled out into the mall area and grassy field behind the
shopping center. They were angry, unruly, and carried placards with hate
slogans plastered onto them. I was saddened to see young teenagers among
them—kids who looked like they came from nice families. Pacing the tops of the
shopping mall on the opposite side of the road that ran along the riverbank,
there were sharp shooters, guns pointed in the direction of the skinhead crowd.
A helicopter flew in a circular pattern above our heads. The press had reported
there would be 630 police present and 150 security personnel. Officially, 350
parade passes had been issued and 75 press passes. Adding up the numbers in my
head, I counted that there were two police present for every marcher in the
parade. The sea of skinheads extending up the street looked as though they
could keep the police busy all afternoon.

We
had arrived just as the march was beginning. The foreign dignitaries assembled at
the front of the parade. Behind them various organized groups marched, beating
drums, carrying whimsical banners and flags, dressed in bright colors. Most of
the Lithuanian marchers were students in their late teens and early twenties.
(…)

The
festive mood was growing despite the helicopters swooping above our heads and
the glint of the sun reflecting off of the snipers’ rifles. The skinhead crowd
was growing even more unruly, but were held back by the police barricade. All I
could think of was the “Attack of the Orks” scene from the Lord of the Rings. (…) The young Lithuanian marchers behind us,
dressed in bright colors and waving rainbow flags, were now playfully blowing
bubbles. A love bubble, I thought. I felt good among them. I was engulfed in a love bubble. The mood was
gentle, peaceful, happy, and despite the circumstances, relaxed. They had come
this far and they had pulled it off. The march was happening.

The
contrast between the positive, peaceful, loving attitude of the marchers and
the aggressive hatred of the protesting skinheads struck a deep chord in me.
That chord resonated. In the following weeks I became more curious about what
it felt like to cope with that kind of prejudice and hatred on an everyday
basis. I wondered about how one lived with that intense hatred and the
ever-constant threat of danger. I held many conversations with gay friends in
Vilnius and abroad. When I visited my friend in Brazil and observed him working
as a telephone interpreter, the idea for the play was born. I would write a
play about Lithuania’s contemporary problems with homophobia, gender issues,
and immigrant issues as filtered through the conversations of a
Lithuanian-English telephone interpreter.

As I was writing and
developing the character of Julius, I knew intuitively that Julius would not
have avoided returning home to Lithuania for twenty years for any other reason
than a deep hurt that had not been resolved. That was when I imagined the hate
crime scene that became the focal point of the play. When The Interpreter was performed in a staged reading in Dublin,
Ireland at the Freedom Ltd. Theater Festival, a group of video artists created
their rendition of how they imagined the hate crime scene. I think they saw it
exactly as I saw it: A tragedy not just for the direct victim, Julius, but the
indirect victim, Karolina, Julius’s best friend, and a silent observer of the
cruel beating. For twenty years Karolina carries the guilt of witnessing the
hate crime and doing nothing to stop it and not reporting it. Her guilt is the
guilt that so many of us carry in our hearts when our communities and societies
tolerate intolerance and close our eyes to violence and victimization.

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